yale university press into the black jpl and the american space program 1976-2004 nov 2006

Into the Black

Into the Black
JPL and the American Space Program,
1976–2004
Peter J. Westwick
Yale University Press New Haven & London
Copyright © 2007 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Set in Stempel Garamond and Syntax type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Westwick, Peter J.
Into the black : JPL and the American space program, 1976–2004 / Peter J. Westwick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11075-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-300-11075-8
1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (U.S.)—History. 2. Astronautics—United States—History.
I. Title.
TL862.J48W47 2006
629.4072′079493—dc22
2006013349
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee

on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Dane and Caden, who look up at night and wonder

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiv
List of Abbreviations xvii
ONE The Inheritance 1
Part I. Acclaim and Agitation: The Murray Years, 1976–1982
TWO Planetary Exploration Triumphant 17
THREE Planetary Exploration in Extremis 42
FOUR External Relations and the Internal Environment 59
FIVE Diversifi cation 78
SIX Return to the Military 93
SEVEN Space Technology 108
Part II. Restoration: The Allen Years, 1982–1991
EIGHT The Rise and Decline of Defense Programs 125
NINE The Dividends of Defense Programs 142
TEN Space and Earth Science 155
ELEVEN JPL under Allen 165
TWELVE Recovery of Flight Projects 175
THIRTEEN Voyager Redux, Galileo, and Magellan 186
Part III. Beyond the Cold War: The Stone Years, 1991–2001
FOURTEEN Faster, Better, Cheaper 207
FIFTEEN Reengineering JPL 228
SIXTEEN The Tilting Triangle and Commercialization 242
SEVENTEEN A Break in the Storm 256
EIGHTEEN Annus Miserabilis 276
NINETEEN Epilogue, 2001–2004 287

TWENTY Conclusion 298
Notes 315
Index 383
viii • Contents
ix
Preface
IN JANUARY 2004 THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY ( JPL) IN PASADENA,
California, captured the public imagination by landing two rovers on Mars
and sending another spacecraft through the tail of a comet. Four years earlier
JPL attracted a different sort of attention when two spacecraft failed in their
missions to Mars, one of them free-falling from 40 meters after its rockets
shut off too early, the other augering into the planet owing to a failure to
convert English into metric units. Twenty years before that the twin Voyager
spacecraft began a triumphant tour of the outer planets by fl ying by Jupiter
in 1979 and returning a remarkable collection of images and data.
This book is the second volume in the history of JPL, a sequel to JPL
and the American Space Program by Clayton Koppes; it picks up the story
from the end of Koppes’s detailed account in 1976 and carries it to 2004. Dur-
ing this period JPL accomplished a string of engineering feats and scientifi c
advances, from Voyager to the Mars rovers; but it also encountered periodic
failures, questions about its national relevance, and doubts about its adapta-
tion to new social realities. This book recounts these events and traces basic
changes in priority at the lab itself, at NASA, and in American science and
technology in general.
JPL is the premier builder of scientifi c spacecraft in the world, and it
has incubated diverse technologies, from digital image processing to micro-
electronic sensors. But that is not the only source of its interest. With cur-
rent annual budgets of well over a billion dollars and a staff of near 5,000,
including about 800 PhDs, it represents a substantial national investment of
money and brainpower. It also illustrates the relation of the individual to the

organization, a central question of the twentieth century and with special
signifi cance for science and technology and their dependence on personal
x • Preface
creativity. Complicating this relationship was JPL’s status as a hybrid insti-
tution, a laboratory owned by the federal government but operated as part
of a university; it thus required a delicate balancing act between technical
independence and public accountability.
JPL’s most important impact came in the realm of the intellect and imagi-
nation. Its spacecraft provided an abundance of new knowledge about the
planets, Earth, and stars. It is fair to say that JPL spacecraft revolutionized our
knowledge of the solar system, by transforming the planets and their moons
from blurry dots of color in the night sky to entire worlds of astonishing
diversity and complexity. JPL spacecraft also looked down on Earth for new
perspectives on such phenomena as global warming, El Niño, and ancient
civilizations; in doing so they changed the methodology of earth scientists,
who came to accept electronic data from remote satellites as equivalent to
that gathered on the ground or at sea. As for the stars, JPL built two of the
most fruitful infrared telescopes as well as the camera that saved the Hubble
telescope. More broadly, JPL’s work provided perhaps the most promising
way scientifi cally to address fundamental questions about man’s place in the
cosmos, including the possibility of life beyond Earth.
The planetary and earth sciences are attracting increasing attention from
historians of science, and the history of JPL illuminates major research en-
deavors in these fi elds.
1
In addition, the period covered by this book, the last
quarter of the twentieth century, offers rich historiographical ground that
few historians of science and technology have tilled.
2
This book extends cold

war history past the countercultural rebellion of the 1960s and the Vietnam
War into the thaw of the 1970s and then to the renewed chill that started in
the late 1970s and lasted into the 1980s. For the space program, this includes
the post-Apollo drawdown and then the remilitarization of space that cul-
minated in the Strategic Defense Initiative. And then there is that central
event of the last half century, the end of the cold war. How did American
science and technology and the American space program adapt to the loss
of their primary driver? The absence of cold war competition helped doom
big federal projects in other fi elds, such as the Superconducting Super Col-
lider, and reoriented the U.S. space program, but many cold war scientifi c
institutions survived its end, including JPL. How and why did the nation
justify these continued investments? How sharp was the break from patterns
of support of science and technology that had predominated for the previ-
ous forty years? Historians have just begun to address these questions; the
history of JPL provides an important illustrative case.
This book covers in detail the twenty-fi ve years from 1976 to 2001. The
opening chapter summarizes the history of JPL up to 1976 and sets the con-
text for the story that follows. The starting point in 1976 marks a transition
Preface • xi
to the post-Apollo space program, an apparent dwindling of national com-
mitment to planetary exploration, and JPL’s subsequent diversifi cation into
energy research. The narrative is divided into three main sections by two
additional turning points: one in 1982, after a crisis in the planetary program
renewed JPL’s military connections; the other in 1991, when the dissolution
of the Soviet Union ended the cold war and sparked a new approach to
spacefl ight known as faster-better-cheaper. The endpoint in 2001 covers the
response to the Mars failures of 1999, and an epilogue includes the effects of
the 9/11 attacks and brings the narrative up through several important mis-
sions in 2004, including the Mars rovers and the Cassini spacecraft’s arrival
at Saturn.

The periodization is based not only on social turning points, refl ected
in programmatic shifts, but also on changes in lab directors. Bruce Murray
arrived in 1976, replacing longtime leader William Pickering, and resigned
after the crisis in 1982; Lew Allen oversaw the recovery in the 1980s and
retired in 1991; Ed Stone then tried to change JPL’s culture in the 1990s, until
his retirement in 2001 and the appointment of Charles Elachi. Each director
imparted his personality to the lab, from the frenetic, freewheeling imagina-
tion of Murray, through the unruffl ed restraint of Allen, to the combination
of cautious consensus-building and revolutionary cultural change of Stone.
And their character determined their response to tests: Murray, combative in
the face of budget cutbacks; Allen smoothly shifting emphasis to technology
after the Challenger shuttle accident; Stone adapting to faster-better-cheaper
to fend off more critical attacks. There is of course a danger to identifying an
entire organization with an individual, to writing what is known as great-man
history. But people matter, and scholars are giving increased attention to the
role of individual authority and leadership in large organizations, including
R&D labs.
3
In each of the three main sections I devote particular chapters to plan-
etary missions, to diversifi cation into such fi elds as energy, defense, earth
science, and astronomy, and to institutional issues, in particular JPL’s evolv-
ing relationship with NASA and Caltech. Writing the history of a lab with
diverse programs entails some jumping about either in time or topic, and in
this book I adopt a thematic organization instead of a chronological one in
order to sharpen the analysis.
Planetary spacecraft remained the main program in this period. I will not
attempt a detailed history of each project, which would require exposition
of diverse institutional, scientifi c, and engineering developments. For such
narratives the reader may consult recent or forthcoming books on Voyager,
Galileo, and the Deep Space Network, as well as several popular works and

memoirs.
4
This book focuses on the history of JPL as an institution. As
xii • Preface
William McNeill, a practitioner of “big history,” has observed, historians
must treat certain events as background noise in order to discern the most
important patterns, much as people at JPL digitally process images to bring
out particular features.
5
The book’s title echoes a Neil Young song that includes the line: “out of
the blue and into the black.” The words capture not only the trajectory of
JPL’s spacecraft, which hurtled beyond earth’s atmosphere into deep space,
but also the implications for JPL’s work. As Young’s song continued, “and
once you’re gone, you can never come back”—nor is anyone else going
out to help you. To meet the challenge of launching irreparable, and highly
expensive, machines, JPL helped develop the regime known as systems engi-
neering, which reduced risk by imposing discipline on individual engineers
and their relation to scientists and managers.
6
The title has two other connotations that represent primary themes of
this history. The fi rst is the relation between the civil space program and
the secret—or “black”—space programs of the military.
7
After starting as a
military lab, JPL largely shed its defense ties by the early 1970s before re-
mobilizing in the 1980s, when it committed up to one-fourth of its program
to defense. JPL’s renewed commitment to the military required negotiation
of a different social context from comparable responses in the post–World
War II and post-Sputnik periods. It also required an integration of civilian
and military space programs, with lasting effects. Most notably, military

space programs engendered the faster-better-cheaper approach that perme-
ated the civil program in the 1990s, and JPL’s adaptation to it drew on its
military experience.
This book’s concern with civil-military relations in space departs from
the usual political-science focus on civilian political control over the mili-
tary, and it also goes beyond the concept of technology transfer or spin-off,
which focuses on the fl ow of military technologies to civilian applications.
8

The case of JPL illuminates the mutual interaction of civilian and military
realms, including the two-way fl ow of people, institutions, and management
techniques as well as technologies, at both the programmatic and the political
level. What conduits ran between the two realms, and what obstacles existed
to the fl ow of information? And how did these change over time? Did JPL’s
exposure to defense work overcome previous ignorance of classifi ed pro-
grams? How did JPL’s civilian programs contribute to the military? Answers
to these questions emerge in this book.
The book’s title suggests yet another, economic meaning: the sort of “in
the black” desired by accountants on fi scal balance sheets. Since JPL is a
nonprofi t, government-funded entity producing such intangible returns as
scientifi c knowledge and cosmic exploration, the term does not apply exactly
Preface • xiii
to JPL. The substantial national investment in JPL, however, encourages
some consideration of the returns, and people in Pasadena and Washington
at times spoke of JPL as a sort of national resource. The economic metaphor
suggests as well the effects of the end of the cold war and the search for
new justifi cations for the civil space program in the 1990s, which settled on
international economic competitiveness to replace the military and political
competition of the space race. Space exploration, this argument ran, would
keep the American economy operating in the black by creating new technolo-

gies and enticing younger generations into science and engineering careers.
JPL refl ected this new rationale in its post–cold war emphasis on technol-
ogy transfer, industrial partnering, and outreach, features that appeared in a
broader trend toward commercialization of research and higher education;
cold war concerns over military domination of science and technology gave
way to worries about industrial infl uence.
9
An economic mindset appears
also in the entrepreneurial attitudes of JPL staff: strategies of diversifi cation,
“marketing” efforts in new fi elds, references to “business models” for plan-
etary spacecraft, and the application of corporate management techniques to
planetary exploration. The economic metaphor fi nally suggests a basic long-
term trend in the operation of JPL, from the independence of an academic
research lab to the more regulated environment of an industrial contractor.
xiv
Acknowledgments
TWO PEOPLE DESERVE PARTICULAR THANKS FOR THIS BOOK. DANIEL J. KEVLES
proposed the project at Caltech and provided valuable feedback throughout
its execution. Winston Gin was the prime mover at JPL and provided much
good guidance to JPL’s people and programs, as well as comments on suc-
cessive drafts. Dan’s and Winston’s wisdom and friendship helped sustain me
from the fi rst outline to the fi nal revisions, a longer road than expected. This
project was performed under the auspices of Caltech, with a grant from the
discretionary funds made available to the JPL director by Caltech. I thank
Ed Stone and Charles Elachi, who as JPL directors approved the funding and
granted me free access to lab archives and staff. It is important to state that
JPL exercised no editorial control over the work; I held a faculty appoint-
ment at Caltech and had complete academic freedom in the writing of this
book.
Caltech was a great place to work. Diana Buchwald, Jed Buchwald, Bill

Deverell, Moti Feingold, Robert Rosenstone, and Judy Goodstein and the
Caltech archives welcomed me to the community, and Michelle Reinschmidt
and Helga Galvan provided administrative and moral support. I have profi ted
from discussions with many other historians of the space program, includ-
ing Roger Launius, Glenn Bugos, Robert Smith, Bettyann Kevles, Douglas
Mudgway, and Michael Meltzer. John Logsdon shared unpublished manu-
scripts, as did Steven Dick and James Strick. I thank in particular Erik Con-
way, the JPL historian, for conversations and thoughtful comments on the
manuscript. Cathy Carson, Christophe Lécuyer, and Jochen Kirchhoff pro-
vided insights on management, and Zuoyue Wang, Jessica Wang, and Alexei
Acknowledgments • xv
Kojevnikov shared Chinese food and good conversation. In Santa Barbara,
Peter Neushul, Nick Rasmussen, and Patrick McCray gave helpful advice
on many subjects and, most important, joined me for surf sessions.
This history rests on research at several archives, fi rst of which is JPL’s.
This book would be far poorer without the consistent help of JPL archivist
Michael Hooks and the archives staff: Everett Booth, Russell Castonguay,
Averell Spicer, and especially Charles Miller. The late John Bluth, former
director of the archives, not only put resources at my disposal, but also shared
many insights. I also thank the NASA History Offi ce, especially Jane Odom
and Steven Garber as well as its directors, Roger Launius and now Steven
Dick, and the space history group at the National Air and Space Museum
for oral histories. For help with images, thanks to Gregory Hoppa; Susan
LaVoie and Jerry Clark in JPL’s Image Processing Lab; and especially David
Deats of JPL’s Photolab.
I talked to many former and current JPL staff, a few informally, most in
formal oral histories: Lew Allen, Blaine Baggett, Phil Barnett, John Beck-
man, Walt Brown, James D. Burke, John Casani, Moustafa Chahine, Frank
Colella, Clifford Cummings, James Cutts, Duane Dipprey, Larry Dumas,
Tom Duxbury, Charles Elachi, Alexander Goetz, Richard Goldstein, William

Green, Norm Haynes, Ross Jones, Charles Kohlhase, Krishna Koliwad, Carl
Kukkonen, Richard Laeser, Arthur Lonne Lane, Pete Lyman, Bruce Murray,
Don Rea, MacGregor Reid, Tony Spear, Rob Staehle, James Stephens, Ed
Stone, Eugene Tattini, Jurrie van der Woude, Giulio Varsi, and Gary Ureda.
Several shared documents from their fi les, and I thank in particular Walt
Brown, Ross Jones, Bruce Murray, and Donna Shirley. Phil Barnett loaned
a copy of his very useful dissertation. Susan Foster provided many inside
stories as well as videotapes and documents, and Annette Ling provided
invaluable administrative help. For those interviews that I tape-recorded,
I intend (with permission of the interviewee) to deposit copies of the tran-
scripts in the JPL archives.
Several former and current NASA staff provided their perspectives: Dan-
iel Goldin, Ed Weiler, Wes Huntress, Kurt Lindstrom, Tom Sauret, and Brent
Bennett. At Caltech, I profi ted from discussions with David Baltimore, Fred
Culick, Rochus Vogt, Steven Koonin, John Ledyard, and David Schimi-
novich. Lawrence Gilbert and Rich Wolf in Caltech’s offi ce of technology
transfer shared particular insights, and Melinda Bakarbessy and Fred Farina
provided patent data. In the wider community of space science and aerospace,
I thank Michael Griffi n, Noel Hinners, Norman Ness, Trevor Sorensen, Steve
Squyres, and Albert D. Wheelon. I would fi nally thank my editor at Yale
xvi • Acknowledgments
University Press, Jean Thomson Black, her assistant Laura Davulis, and copy
editor Eliza Childs for shepherding the manuscript to publication.
My deepest thanks go to my wife Medeighnia, whose support and for-
bearance made this possible, and to our kids Dane and Caden, whose pene-
trating questions about space reminded me what this is all about.
xvii
Abbreviations
APL Applied Physics Laboratory
ASAS All Source Analysis System

C
3
I command, control, communications, and intelligence
CCD charge-coupled device
CRAF Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby
DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DOD Department of Defense
DOE Department of Energy
DSN Deep Space Network
ENSCE Enemy Situation Correlation Element
ERDA Energy Research and Development Administration
GALEX Galaxy Evolution Explorer
IPAC Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
IRAS Infrared Astronomical Satellite
IUS Inertial Upper Stage
JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory
LESS Low-Cost Exploration of the Solar System
LODE Large Optics Demonstration Experiment
MER Mars Exploration Rover
MOU memorandum of understanding
MSTI Miniature Seeker Technology Integration
NACA National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NEAR Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NRO National Reconnaissance Offi ce
OAST Offi ce of Aeronautics and Space Technology
OMB Offi ce of Management and Budget
QWIP quantum-well infrared photodetector
SAR synthetic aperture radar

SDI Strategic Defense Initiative
SETI Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
SIR Shuttle Imaging Radar
SSEC Solar System Exploration Committee
TQM Total Quality Management
VLSI very large-scale integration
VOIR Venus Orbital Imaging Radar
WF/PC Wide Field/Planetary Camera
xviii • Abbreviations
1
THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY ( JPL) STARTED AS A GRADUATE-STUDENT
rocket project at Caltech in the 1930s. At the time Caltech was already a
center for science and engineering in the United States, a position it would
occupy for the rest of the century. In 1930 Caltech lured Theodore von
Kármán, a leading authority on aerodynamics, to become director of its
Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, or GALCIT. Von Kármán’s lab at
fi rst studied airplane fl ight until a graduate student, Frank Malina, proposed
thesis work on rockets. Malina banded together with two other rocket en-
thusiasts, John Parsons and Ed Forman; they fi red their fi rst rocket motor
in fall 1936 at an isolated spot in the Arroyo Seco, a dry wash three miles
above the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The wisdom of using a remote site was
confi rmed when subsequent tests on campus misfi red, one explosively. By
spring of 1938 Malina and his group had a rocket that ran on the test stand
for over a minute. The rocket work piqued military interest, and in January
1939 the National Academy of Sciences began funding GALCIT for work
on rocket-assisted takeoff for airplanes. The following year the Army Air
Corps took over, and the expanding program soon shifted for good to the
Arroyo Seco site.
1
Arsenal for the Army

The onset of World War II brought big budgets and secrecy to the rocketeers.
It also led to the formal establishment of JPL. Following intelligence reports
in 1943 of German rocket development, von Kármán, Malina, and Hsue-shen
Tsien, a Chinese mathematician performing theoretical analyses for GALCIT,
proposed a long-range program. The army responded with enthusiasm,
ONE
The Inheritance
2 • The Inheritance
although Caltech’s trustees approved the contract only for the duration of
the war. The arrangement nevertheless illustrated a basic watershed in the
history of American science and technology: the wartime use of research
contracts to enlist academic science in service for the federal government,
particularly the military. In this case the army paid for new facilities and
operating expenses, while Caltech contributed its administration, faculty,
and graduates, as well as its name, to the enterprise. The army thus obtained
access to expertise outside its ranks, lab staff got a technical challenge and
the resources to pursue it, and both scientists and university administrators
earned a patriotic sense of contributing to the war effort. The campus also
received a fi xed fee on top of the operating budget, a more concrete and
compelling inducement that aided recovery from the Depression.
2
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory offi cially opened on 1 July 1944, the new
name shedding the speculative stigma of rockets. When von Kármán’s in-
creasing work for the air force took him to Washington later that year, Malina
stepped in as director. JPL did not demobilize at the end of the war, although
that required accommodations with campus. Caltech had agreed to only a
wartime project, and many campus faculty wanted to return to peacetime
research. Caltech barred classifi ed research on campus and required military
contracts to involve fundamental research instead of strictly applications.
Malina and von Kármán suggested that Caltech set up its own rocket labo-

ratory for unclassifi ed, basic research on rockets for scientifi c use. Caltech’s
trustees instead decided to continue the existing arrangement, after the army
assured them that JPL could focus on basic, unclassifi ed research. Thus, like
other large wartime labs, JPL survived through the postwar fl ux and was
ready for service at the onset of the cold war.
3
The decision to continue JPL as a cold war military lab had its costs.
Domestic anticommunism perhaps encouraged Malina to resign as director in
1946, as he had moved in left-leaning circles in the 1930s and come under the
suspicion of the FBI. It certainly cost the lab the later services of Tsien; when
he sought to return to Maoist China, the federal government detained him
in the United States and barred him from classifi ed material and thus from
JPL.
4
Military work had programmatic consequences as well. The army had
pushed for a broad program on guided missiles, and the lab began to acquire
expertise in electronics as well as in aerodynamics and propulsion. To high-
light the shift, in 1954 William Pickering, an electrical engineer from Caltech,
assumed the directorship of JPL, replacing Louis Dunn, Malina’s successor.
Pickering’s low-key geniality and informality belied the increasing orga-
nization of the lab. From the war through the late 1950s JPL designed and
built a series of larger and longer-range missiles, designated by military rank:
from the Private to Corporal and fi nally Sergeant. The work initially entailed
The Inheritance • 3
much basic research in chemistry, physics, aerodynamics, and electronics;
but the army wanted an operational weapon in the end, and the national
emergency of the early 1950s—the Soviet atomic bomb, war in Korea, and
development of tactical nuclear weapons—increased the urgency for a tactical
missile. In 1950 the army asked JPL to weaponize the Corporal, primarily
to carry nuclear warheads, and over the next several years JPL moved from

research into development and then production functions, and even into
training troops in use of the weapon.
5
Corporal started JPL’s transition from a small, unclassifi ed, academic
research outfi t to a large, secret, development organization. The transition
intensifed in 1954 when JPL undertook Sergeant, which would use solid in-
stead of liquid propellants. An ad hoc, academic design process and loose or-
ganization had proved insuffi cient to handle the many problems on Corporal,
including component failure, integration of components into subsystems and
systems, oversight of contractors, and operation and training. The solution
was managerial, not technological. The Sergeant managers—Robert Parks
and his deputy, Jack James—included reliability, testing, and maintenance
factors in the component design process, standardized the test and safety
procedures, and, a crucial step, insisted on a progressive design freeze, with
documented control of all changes. These procedures enabled JPL to develop
Sergeant largely on schedule. From a longer view, they represent the initial
steps toward the techniques of systems engineering.
6
By 1953 JPL had more than 1,000 staff and a budget of $11 million. Despite
the army’s assurances, most of the work was secret: by 1958 almost two-
thirds of lab publications were classifi ed. The increasing secrecy, formality,
and production nature of the work weakened links with campus, but Caltech
administrators and trustees rebuffed suggestions to transfer the lab to another
contractor or to the army itself.
7
Onward and Upward with NASA
Von Kármán had initially intended to extend the missile series up through
colonel, “the highest rank that works.” But Pickering chafed under the
pressure of developing weapons systems, and he and Caltech president Lee
DuBridge determined not to go beyond Sergeant. The lab instead looked

outward, and upward, for new opportunity. JPL rocketeers had always kept
an eye on space as a destination for their hardware. In 1949 they reached it,
with a version of the Corporal launched on top of a V-2 rocket to a height
of 250 miles. In 1955 JPL renewed this collaboration with expropriated Ger-
man rocket scientists at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), for
whom JPL developed a radio-guidance system and reentry vehicle for an
4 • The Inheritance
intermediate-range ballistic missile. This work led to a tracking system that
could detect very faint radio signals thousands of kilometers away and to a
proto-satellite vehicle.
8
The federal government was meanwhile prosecuting the crash program
for an intercontinental ballistic missile and beginning to appreciate the ap-
peal of space for international prestige as well as military uses. The United
States declared its intent to launch a satellite as part of the International
Geophysical Year in 1957–58, but President Eisenhower insisted on a civil-
ian, science-oriented precedent and thus sank a collaborative proposal from
the army’s labs at JPL and ABMA. Then, on 4 October 1957, the Soviets
launched Sputnik. When the hurried American response failed dismally on
the launch pad, JPL and the army got the green light to enter the space race.
JPL’s tracking system and reentry vehicle earned it the right to build the
satellite, known as Explorer 1. The triumphant launch of Explorer on 31
January 1958 propelled JPL into the public eye and also into a leading role
in the nation’s space program.
9
JPL followed with more Explorers and two Pioneers, the last of which
aimed for the moon and signaled JPL’s intent to push beyond earth orbit.
Meanwhile, after much debate, Eisenhower and Congress in mid-1958 created
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA coveted
JPL’s space expertise, and on 1 January 1959 the lab transferred to the new

agency. JPL would thence have to negotiate its role amidst the often overlap-
ping missions of other NASA centers. NASA assigned JPL responsibility for
automated spacecraft for lunar and planetary exploration, which solidifi ed
the shift away from its titular interest in propulsion. In the heady days of the
early space race, JPL planners laid out a series of fl ights to the moon, Venus,
and Mars, culminating in a manned fl ight around Mars and back in 1965.
They worried that this program lacked ambition. NASA instead accepted a
more measured plan for three main fl ight series: fi rst, reconnaissance fl ights
to the moon known as Ranger; then Surveyor, to soft-land a spacecraft on
the moon; and, concurrently, Mariner probes to Venus and Mars.
10
But even
this scaled-back program would push JPL to the breaking point and beyond,
and force the lab to forge a new regime.
The shift from rockets to spacecraft was not just a matter of master-
ing new technical fi elds. JPL engineers went from developing production-
line weapon systems, with dozens or hundreds of test fl ights, to designing
custom-built spacecraft that were too elaborate and expensive to test in fl ight.
The Corporal and Sergeant programs in the 1950s had impelled the fi rst steps
toward systems engineering, but in the rush of the early space race JPL man-
agers had dispensed with formal methods in favor of quick results, fi ring off
spacecraft until project engineers learned how to make one fl y.
11